The Political Resurrection of Saint Paul

Matthew Bullimore
The Political Theology of Paul. By Jacob Taubes. Translated by Dana Hollander. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 160.

As far as most theologians are concerned, Saint Paul has never really gone away. He has, of course, been reconsidered and appropriated for different ends on many occasions. But since Nietzsches tirades, the philosophers have let him be and seem to have gradually forgotten about him. Some recent philosophers, however, have noticed him lurking about on the edge of theology, looking a little frustrated and perhaps even just a trifle bored. Jacob Taubes was one of the first to do so and to realize that there is still a lot more that Paul wants to say. Until his death in 1987, Jacob Taubes held the Chair in Hermeneutics at the Free University of Berlin. He also taught at Harvard and Columbia, which perhaps makes it surprising that this is the first work of his to be translated into English. One suspects that he is only now being translated in the wake of the recent Anglo-American interest in the works of Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Slavoj iek, all of whom, after Taubes, have recently rediscovered Saint Paul for themselves. Indeed, Agambens The Time That Remains is dedicated to Taubes. Upon opening the volume, one can immediately sense the difficulties that the translator must have faced in coherently setting out on paper the teachings of a man who thought out loud. (The fact that Taubes was a Rabbi had more than a little to do with this.) This edition presents a set of lectures that Taubes delivered in Heidelberg shortly before his death, and all difficulties aside, it nobly manages to bear witness to the oral form of Taubes teaching. The lectures as a whole have an autobiographical and notably idiosyncratic tenor, and they document the last testament of a Jewish intellectual living in Germany during the second half of the last century. Moreover, they offer at once an homage to and a stringent critique of the work of the Catholic jurist, Carl Schmitt, at whose urging Taubes produced these lectures. Taubes engagement with Schmitt, it should be noted, was not without cost. For his dialogue with Schmitt, Taubes was repeatedly censured by other Jewish thinkers, which may explain why he waited until the eleventh hour to fulfill his promise to Schmitt.
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In many ways, then, this is not an easy book. The style of the book follows from its highly charged and polemical content, and the argument is littered with asides, digressions, omissions, presumptions, as well as many witticisms and putdowns. Taubes theses are elusive, and his refusal to conclude sections can be frustrating. The editors afterword attempts a risky reconstruction of the argument, which is necessary, welcome, and successful. (The present reviewer was relieved to read that one professor of Biblical Studies who had no problems with Badiou and Agamben found these lectures bewildering.) In addition to a preface that situates the lectures in the context of Taubes advanced cancer (he spent a day in between the four lectures in intensive care), there are also two appendices that aid the reader in reconstructing Taubes dialogue with Schmitt. The first presents Taubes own account of their relationship, and the second reproduces two letters: the first, addressed to Armin Mohler, a right-wing extremist with whom Taubes had studied, found its way into Schmitts hands; and the second, addressed to Schmitt himself, bore witness to a comedy of letters reminiscent of the fated missive in Poes The Purloined Letter (99100). For all the extra material, which takes up fully one-third of the book, the edition as a whole does not miss the apocalyptic tone and urgency of Taubes lectures. These lectures were, for Taubes, a final opportunity to put forward his own negative political theology, as Schmitt had demanded that he must do even as they nevertheless undermine the anti-semitic reading of Pauls letter to the Romans, which underpinned Schmitts work. Reading these lectures, one comes to realize that Taubes does not provide a program for a negative political theology, which in its very negativity would disallow a political system. Instead, he outlines the contours of its powers of critique and describes the resources for and urgent necessity of partaking in negative political theology as a present way of life. The medium for the presentation of this negative political theology is a new reading of Paul and a reflection upon the reception of Paul in the Western philosophical and political traditiona tradition that for Taubes is either explicitly or implicitly theological, whether it knows this or not. In Part I (Paul and Moses: The Establishment of a New People of God), Taubes begins by reading the epistle to the Romans as a political declaration of war on Caesars Empire. By analyzing the salutation and the introduction of the letter (Rom. 1:17), Taubes unearths a thoroughly political vision. Paul is a servant of the Messiah, of the royal line of David, who is also the Son of God. All that is imperatorial, kingly, imperial about Christ is brought forth as a direct challenge to the Emperor in language that any thoughtful Roman citizen would see as properly belonging to Caesar (14). As he teases out questions about legitimation, election, Jewish-Christian/Gentile-Christian relations, and the dialectic between the centralized Jerusalem church and the Diasporic Gentile church,

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Taubes describes a Paul who is utterly Jewishand for that reason alone, utterly political. The messianic message of Paul is for Taubes a wholly Jewish message, a reading that he develops through a discussion of Sabbatianism as well as an account of the logic of Jewish Messianism. Taubes argues that for Paul, law is a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum. There was at the time a general Hellenistic aura, an apotheosis of nomos (23). Law could be seen as hypostasis, as the Universal. But Paul is not taken in by this great nomos liberalism. He is totally illiberal. Taubes, too, has yet to be taken in by a liberal. What he recognizes in Paul is a transvaluation of values: It isnt nomos but rather the one who was nailed to the cross by nomos who is the Imperator! (24). Pauls new vision of the universal is mediated through the particularity of this crucified king and so transvaluates the worlds values. Paul does not simply oppose a nationalist and Zealot political theology of the Torah against the cosmopolitical Roman nomos. He fundamentally negates law as a force of political order and refuses all forms of sovereignty, be they imperatorial or theocratic (Afterword 121). Pauls universalism is thus determinate in that it is a universalism seen through this one, and yet it does not refuse any who wish to partake of the new people of God formed through faith in this Messiah. All of Israel is to be saved, even as it is transfigured into a new people of God. And so Taubes reads Romans 811 again in order to find a logic of messianic universalism that refuses any anti-semitic cast. There follows a complex and inspired analysis and comparison of Romans 8:319:5 and the Talmudic treatise Berakhot 32a, by way of Rosenzweigs analysis of the liturgies of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Taubes argues persuasively that Paul deploys a typology between himself and Moses. On Sinai Moses pleads with God for his people, who are at that very moment worshipping an idol, and he seeks Gods forgiveness for them, even if he must be made anathema for their sake. So Paul also pleads for his people according to the flesh, who may provoke Gods wrath by not having faith in the Messiah, and he wishes to be similarly accursed if it would ensure their inclusion in Gods newly revealed work. Taubes offers here a phenomenology of Jewish experience as it regards divine forgiveness and wrath. The performative nature of the Yom Kippur liturgy is set alongside Romans 9 in order to show that Paul undergoes the same agonies as Moses before God. However, where Moses succeeds in his pleas and brings the law, Paul presents a new understanding of the people of God and of the transvaluation of law by virtue of their faith in the Messiah. The Torah no longer determines Israel, and in its place is an allegiance to and trust in Gods Messiah, who negates and yet transvaluates all law. The pneumatic content of Pauls thought in Romans 913 is then explored with reference to Spinoza and Hegel. Taubes sees Pauls allegorical reading not as a spiritualizing that negates the material but, via Benjamin, as the perfor-

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mance of a way of life in which the spiritual breaks through into the material. Allegoresis is put alongside typology as part of Pauls textual strategy, and so the historical and horizontal (typological) is placed alongside the transcendent and vertical (allegorical). Pauls transfiguration of the people of God by virtue of their faith in the Messiah (the vertical) is thus accomplished by and proven through reference to the law and to the prophets (the horizontal). The much disputed concept of faith (pistis) is shown to be as much a part of a Jewish logic as a Hellenistic one, for it is faith-in-the-Messiah, who by virtue of all human reckoning (Roman and Jewish Law) cannot be the Messiah for he is the accursed upon the cross. This moves towards the crux of Taubes discussion with Schmitt. (This is where an almost ninety-year-old man sat with someone who was a little over fifty and spelled out 911 (51).) Paul writes: As regards the Gospel they [the Jewish people] are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors (Rom. 11:28). If Schmitts antagonistic conception of the political has at its root the distinction between friend and enemy, and behind that a theological distinction between Christian friend and Jewish enemy, then Taubes shows that for Paul the Jewish people are enemies who are nevertheless beloved, and so are to be grafted back into the root by way of the witness to the Gentiles (the nations as light to the chosen people). By virtue of their beloved status, the messianic vision hopes for the inclusion of all in all (pas) Israel. The new union that is the body of Christ is a life born out of pneuma and lived out in agape, a new radically democratic association of the sons of God. In Part II (Paul and Modernity: Transfigurations of the Messianic), Taubes outlines the reception of Paul in the Western tradition both by those who abuse the Pauline message and by those who recognize or rehearse the messianic potential of his negative political theology. Here the argument is less clear than in the first section, as Taubes rapidly deploys various thinkers to make his points. He begins with Marcions anti-semitic and Gnostic reading of Paul, which he sees as a precursor to the type of Germanic Protestantism exemplified by Adolf von Harnack. Knowledge of God is separated from consideration of the people of God, the corporeal community, and Pauls Jewish messianic logic. Opposed to this essentialized Christianity, which has been deprived of Hellenistic and Jewish political potential, are the Zealots of the Absolute and of the Decision, Carl Schmitt and Karl Barth. Alongside Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig, Barth and Schmitt reject the liberal consensus and any secular deliberative model of political government in favour of a Kierkegaardian stress on the apocalyptic importance of the decisiona decision summed up in the decision, that for Christ or for Barabbas (68). Either one decides for the in-breaking of the Absolute into the world (i.e., a messianic faith) or one does not. The decision is allimportant for it is the choice of the exception, the miracle (85). The exception

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is that which opens law to that which comes from without and disturbs its apparently immanent security. Schmitt argues that Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception and that the law can not stand alone by virtue of its own innate strength, buttressed by the power of an immanent human reason (64). Only a voluntaristic divine legitimation, made manifest in this decision on the state of the exception, can legitimate a system of law. For Schmitt, the one who decides when the law can be suspended is the one who can preserve the state from the forces of anarchy. Those who ignore the exception leave the state susceptible to revolution from below. By contrast, Taubes introduces Benjamins Pauline conception of nihilism as world politics, in which one relates to the world in its irredeemable nature in the mode of as though not (1 Cor. 7:2931), for the present form of the world is passing away. Instead, one lives for the messianic because salvation cannot come by way of worldly sovereignty. Finally, Taubes turns to Nietzsche and Freud. Nietzsche, of course, makes a decisionfor atheism and not for Christbut according to Taubes he fails to grasp the importance of the Pauline dialectic between guilt and atonement. Nietzsche is a humanist with a humane impulse, but he loses the sense that in the I there is a profound powerlessness (87). For Paul, however, the cosmos and humanity within it are guilty but justified by faith in the Messiah, whose death marks the redundancy of worldly sovereignty. The superman in immanence is set alongside the body of Christ in its openness to transcendence, where the latter is more anti-modern in its acceptance that it has not and cannot pass beyond guilt and dcadence by its own power. Like Freud, Nietzsche has a modern preoccupation with a humanly achievable emancipation from guilt, however differently conceived (Afterword 136). Freud believes he can heal guiltand here Taubes offers a fascinating reading of Moses and Monotheism, where Freud identifies with Paul and not with Moses. But Taubes insistence on original sin as a nexus of guilt that encompasses human history leads him to the more humble position that guilt, as recognized by law, can only be overcome through participation in the body of Christ (Afterword 137). The apocalyptic openness to the transcendent, manifest in the decision for the Messiah, thus cuts across modern interpretations of sovereignty. It also tells against Schmitts defense of totalitarianism by bearing witness to a new covenantal community based on an order that goes beyond mere law. Taubes reading of Paul is tantalizingly close to recent scholarly treatments of Paul (see Neil Elliott, N. T. Wright, Richard Horsley, Bruno Blumenfeld, Robert Jowett, and Alain Gignac) that constitute a small but growing body of work examining the political content and potential of Pauls letters. When Pauls Roman context is brought to the forein contrast to the one-sided depictions of Paul the Pharisee or Paul the Hellenistthen the subversive political message of Pauls gospel becomes much more evident. Taubes reading is particularly neces-

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sary because it shows that Pauls political voice is inseparable from his Jewish voice. While Taubes describes this resonance with a hermeneutists skill, his phenomenological-experiential approach appropriates the obviously polemical figure of Paul for the Jewish tradition. This translation of The Political Theology of Paul is also important for an understanding and reappraisal of the works of other theorists who are now turning to Paul. Taubes extended conversation with Schmitt opens up a new angle of critique on a thinker who has had considerable influence in contemporary political theory. While the Right has obviously had an interest in Schmitt, Frankfurt School theorists and even Benjamin on the Left have been moved by Schmitts critique of liberalism and parliamentarism. It is thus worth briefly fleshing out the main differences between Taubes and Schmitt. While Schmitt sought to preserve the State against chaos by the totalitarian seizure of the moment of exception, Taubes has no spiritual investment in the world as it is (103). The apocalyptic moment for Taubes, on the contrary, maintains the absolutely necessary separation of the spiritual powers from the worldly powers (103). Negative political theology undermines the worldly order and especially law as an allencompassing ordering power. The worldly order is not seen as legitimated by a non-immanent category and so governed by a representative or imitative form of government (e.g., the totalitarian concept as derived from a voluntaristic form of theism: the representative political order is legitimated by a form of divine sovereignty). Instead, as the editors of this volume explain, sovereignty for Taubes is linked to a sociological consideration of the community: Taubes theology is not a theology of sovereignty but a theology of the community, and this community can only be formed by the apocalyptic decision to have faith in a Messiah who breaks apart all hitherto known forms of universality and sovereignty (Afterword 140). The new community is thus not constituted, like Schmitts, upon a fundamental political antagonism. Taubes reading of Paul instead sees the new community as necessarily integrating both Gentiles and those who as yet do not have messianic faith, i.e., the people of God on the traditional understanding. Thus the communitys love of the enemy (outward love) and the love of the neighbor (inward love) redefine the political as an agapeic economy of gift exchange (witness Pauls collection for the poor in Jerusalem (17)). If, for Paul, the love of God and the love of others is inseparable, it is nevertheless the love of the neighbor, in Romans 13, that is foregrounded. For Paul, love is social, and the love of God is mediated through the new community, the body in Christ (Afterword 12931). So while Schmitt is the apocalypticist thinker of counter-revolution (Afterword 142), the apocalyptic moment for Taubes is truly revolutionary because it opens the world up to its transfiguration by the coming of the transcendent, which disrupts all human forms of

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sovereignty. In this way Taubes Paul is far more Christian than Schmitts could ever be. To have Taubes critique of Schmitt, even after the fact, opens once again the possibility of new conversations between philosophers and theologians about the subject of the political. Considering the reactions to and appropriations of Schmitts analyses in much contemporary political theory and theology, the publication of Taubes lectures is particularly timely. The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on radical democracy (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, The Democratic Paradox) uses Schmitts thought as a basis for understanding the operation of liberal democracy. Against the deliberative model of liberal democracy, which seeks to find a consensus by means of rational mediation (Habermas), their work utilizes a Derridean approach to highlight the constitutive antagonisms at the heart of liberal democracy. If liberalism is interested in the freedom and the rights of each individual, while the demos is interested in the opinion of the many, then a tension remains between the two. Democracy can only succeed on the basis of this agonism (no longer an ant-agonism, for democracy sublimates violence into votes, as it were), and there is no hope of a rational unanimous consensus that is not a totalitarianism. Schmitts concept of the political thus returns, but Laclau and Mouffe disavow Schmitts attempt to remove pluralism from the State, seeing it rather as constitutive of a democracy that will not and cannot find its end ineven though it seeks to move towardsan impossible eschatological moment of consensus (Laclau). This agonistic economy has, of course, been challenged by thinkers such as Badiou and iek, who see it as merely commensurate with the eschatology of the capitalist economy. Enjoyment is forever deferred, and so the endless circulation and rearticulation of democracy puts it in a bad infinite, susceptible to an endless re-territorialization by the workings of Capital. Like Laclau and Mouffe, Giorgio Agamben (State of Exception, The Time that Remains) sees the genius in Schmitts understanding of the political. And similarly again, Agamben accepts Schmitts analyses but not his conclusions. For Agamben, the state of exception puts the lie to the liberal account of laws own immanent foundation and the possibility of founding a consensus upon reason. But instead of accepting this fact and establishing a new account of democracy based upon constitutive agonism, Agamben hopes for a different form of community to come. Agamben appropriates Pauls Christ and yet, like Badiou, evacuates the content of the figure of Jesus in favor of drawing out a logic of the messianic. The messianic subject lives, after Benjamin and Taubes, as though not in this world. A new living otherwise is possible in which the subject dispossesses all previous identities. However, unlike Badiou, Agamben does not posit a new universalism, for the messianic subject is the use and vocation of the subject who still exists in the world that is passing away. The messianic subject

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marks a split with and in all previously formed identities and forms of community. For Agamben, Gospel thus stands to Law as the State of exception stands to Law; but the apocalyptic effect of Gospel is not an unleashing of Schmitts totalitarianism. Like Taubes, then, there is an agreement that the apocalyptic moment that Schmitt sees in the political actually splits open all previously known conceptions of law, but not in order to found a totalitarian state (either in Schmittian fashion or by way of Badious new universalism). Instead, it allows one to live otherwise in a community of those who do likewise. Schmitt, the totalitarian apologist, thus gives birth to a conception of necessary plurality within the democratic state (Laclau and Mouffe) and to a thoroughgoing critique of the totalitarian possibilities inherent in the state of exception (Agamben). Schmitt provided an apologia for a form of consensus founded and maintained by totalitarianism. By contrast, Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism) argues that a new consensus cannot be found within the orbit of the old state of being but only through fidelity to an Event that has a mutually constituting relationship with the Subject faithful to that Event. For Badiou, Paul is an amenable example because he founds a new universalism free of all other contingent identity markers (slave/free, male/female, Jew/Gentile) and offers a paradigm of a new subject and a new community. By contrast to Taubes interpretation, however, Badious Paul remains susceptible to a charge of Marcionite negation of past particularities. Pauls faith in the Event, removed from its Roman, Jewish, and Hellenistic context, offers a paradigm for revolutionary change now devoid of content. Taubes, rather than immanentizing this moment of decision and the concept of fidelity, opens the subject up to the transcendent apocalyptically breaking through into the present order. Yet this reading does not negate Pauls particularity. True, Paul does offer a new form of community based on consensus, a new form of universalism, but it is not predicated upon an annihilation of his particular circumstances. After all, Pauls messianic logic is a Jewish logic that is reacting against a particular but false Roman universalism. What is new, and particular, about the Pauline universalism is that while it breaks open the law and reveals that it is not immanently sustained, it nonetheless transfigures it by placing it within a supra-nomic transcendent economy of love, embodied in the ecclesial community. Against the hierarchical and voluntarist conception of sovereignty in Schmitt, Taubes Paul presents a radically democratic consensus where each is equal by virtue of their sonship in Christ. Like Schmitt, Taubes puts forward a political theology, which presumes the nonautarchy of the human being, the insufficiency of human innate and acquired capacities, the impossibility of an immanent rational foundation of ones way of life (Afterword 140). But instead of founding sovereignty upon a model of divine fiat, Taubes founds it upon the model of a community that is aware of its own sinfulness. The consen-

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sus is neither based upon the success of human reason (deliberative liberalism) nor grounded in the exercise of naked power (Schmitt); instead, it is organized, structured and made possible by the economy of love that faith in the Messiah creates. In anti-modern fashion, the assertion of the guilt of humanity allows for the possibility of redemption and atonement from without, which must nevertheless be constantly liturgically enacted and performed. (I would be inclined to develop theology out of liturgics: perhaps this is a Catholic notion (38).) Taubes reading of Paul thus provides a strongly ethical reading that emphasizes the new life of the people of God as constituted by the worship of the One who confounds all human universalisms and who paradoxically manifests a law of love beyond law: a messianic account of at-one-ment. Taubes work, by virtue of its form and its content, leaves open many questions, but it will significantly enlighten and enrich the current debates that have so surprisingly rediscovered Paul as a present concern. Theologians, and especially Christian theologians, will benefit from the phenomenological insights of Taubes and from turning their attention to the urgent political message of Paul, now liberated from the constraints of historical-critical methodology. Good philosophical engagements with Paul, one might dare to hope, could reap fresh ecumenical and inter-religious understandings. This volume likewise adds to the current philosophical debates about the nature of a different time, a messianic time, and about the nature of a different subjectivity, a messianic subject. The fecundity of Paul as political thinker is seen anew through the lens of a philosopher who understands that theology and philosophy are not tribal departments (4). Despite the modern segregation of apparently autonomous university departments, Taubes premodern and antimodern approach reveals, as did Schmitts in another way, the hidden theology behind modern (and now postmodern) accounts of the political. At the very least, the metaphysics thus unveiled calls for the attention of political theorists. The importance of Taubes account is that, following on Benjamin and Barth, it reintroduces the transcendent into these debates as indispensable where the immanent is revealed in its crisis (Afterword 135). In the context of the new debate, the choice that Taubes thus makes possible is the one between Christ and Barabbas. Against the secularizing and immanentizing tendency of contemporary theory, the transcendent crossing of the political is here theorized and even lived out. The apocalyptic formation of the new community allows for an ontology of politics predicated upon a love that is not just love of the neighbor but also of the enemy. The equality of the members of the new community is founded by a transcendent outside, and hence as equality in Christ (Afterword 135). As Taubes writes in a letter, law is finally not the first and the last after all, because there are even between man and man relationships that exceed, transcend lawlove, mercy, forgiveness (not at all sentimentally,

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but in reality) (110). For Taubes as for other contemporary theologians (John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock), the danger of a politics based upon the immanent is the danger of a nihilism that leads to one form of totalitarianism or another. Taubes maintains the difference between the inside and the outside, but the outside is now seen as the radically other outside of the transcendent: Without this distinction we are exposed to the thrones and powers that in a monistic cosmos no longer know any Beyond. The boundary between spiritual and worldly may be controversial and is always to be drawn anew (a never-ending task of political theology), but should this separation cease, we will run out of (Occidental) breath (112). What constitutes the life of the Pauline community, in Christian thought or in Taubes Jewish understanding, is that it receives itself from an outside that is not a voluntaristic idol but a source of love beyond sovereignty, beyond the mere exercise of power for its own sake, beyond Reason alone, and finally perhaps even beyond universality. So, as Taubes enjoins: Begin anew to interpret Paul! (95).